(June 12, 2014 at 1:47 pm)JuliaL Wrote:(June 12, 2014 at 2:05 am)YaAli21 Wrote: I think you need to pick up a book on evolution. I have studied human behaviour and evolution to a great degree. If evolution hard wired morality into humans and not just the capabilities of survival (which our moral choices are based on according to you) why do think societies differ in right and wrong across, history, land, cultures, countries and time? Shouldn't they be the same? I challenge you to find me one gene that encodes some aspect of morality to such a degree that indicates innate morals. Atheists have no moral compass, it's all subjective to them. What is right to one person can be different for another. It's all subjective. Atheists are in no position to judge morality. I would go as far to say, that if I was an atheist I would be a hypocrite if I opposed the Rwanda genocide.No surprise, but your views on (human) morality are determined by your (I presume) status as human. Moral codes across societies not in contact are not expected to be identical. They change over time and under environmental pressures. Still, you will find there are common taboos against murder, incest, theft which result in more stable, and therefore more likely to be observed, societies. Go google 'memetics' and 'memeplex.'
Try as hard as you can to consider morality which (as islamic you probably consider as objective, universal and absolute) from anothers perspective. In the following example case, please consider the perspective of the mother bear. She will kill you if you appear to be a threat to her cub. Is this wrong from your perspective? Probably. More importantly, is it wrong from the perspective of the she bear? Probably not.
May I preempt what I assume will be your defense that she is acting from instinct not morality. Such a claim is a bald assertion as you are not privy to her internal state.
First off I am not muslim, I am an atheist and have been since my earliest memories,,, Second, I happen to agree with most of what you say. Of course you can't tell the internal state of the bear. Using that line of logic you could say that there you also couldn't know the "internal state" of any other human than yourself. It doesn't really matter what the motives are or what label you want to put on it, you can't deny that the ACTION of the animal is to preserve her bloodline and indirectly the species. I think that morality (instinct whatever) is a combination of both nature and nurture. I have no evidence that instinct is hard wired, but with the completion of the human genome mapping project scientists are finding that the "junk DNA" previously thought to serve no purpose is actually integral to some human behavior. I think in the future it is inevitable that they will find some DNA sequences (or abandoned sequences) that contribute to instinct. I don't think that scientists could test if this is true because it would be impossible to limit the independent variables.
